Campaign to promote free software in Karnataka
Aim To spread the awareness and adoption of Free Software to strengthen the Free Software Community in Karnataka. Ideology behind Free Software Check this link: GNU India On Richard Stallman, the founder of this movement RMS Homepage Action Plan *Target the Software Developers community. *Target Engineering colleges *Target Schools * Take help from active communities in Bangalore Howto Implement Action PLan In a free knowledge society, anyone who wants to obtain knowledge can do so without any problems. Hence in that spirit I would like to put forward the rationale behind the above 'action plan'. By the sheer number of school students, schools have a decisive role in making the free software movement a success. But to take free software to the schools and make it a part of the curriculam we need to generate the huge technical support required to execute this plan ie., the engineering/technical students who are technically adept. However, this too is a tough endeavour as most engineering students are not 'free software' oriented. We need to convince this students by showing them practically that free software works. This can be accomplished by supporting them college projects and mentoring them. Of course, to bring them on par with the projects, we need to have multiple technical sessions at the Institution level. As Professionals, it is a tough job to provide 'constant' support and hence we come to the concept of the Swatantra Software Users/Developers Groups at the Institution level. This group consists of students of the institution who will form a self-sustaining support system with support from the Professionals. Thus an efficient eco-system is created. Now we come to the Developers community. This is the first line without whom the free software movement cannot kick off(And yes, the long-term goal should be to liberate the free software movement from the developers community). Our responsibility is to reach out to a maximum number of education institutions and work to generate free software activists and contributers because the students are the life of this Movement. We need to constantly enlist the help of non-free-software developers as well and get them to also contribute to the Movement. In my opinion, without following these basic steps it is going to be very tough to take the Free Software Movement to the next level here in Karnataka. The campaign will be co-ordinated through this page, fsug-bangalore mailing list and orkut community Volunteers If you would like to help out in the campaign * add your name here * Link to your user page (create one if you have not done it yet, sign up if you haven't, it helps us in communicating updates) * Add your contact information (emails, phone numbers) in your user page #Praveen A #Sujith Haridasan #Shashank Bharadwaj #Vikram Vincent # Mallikarjun #Kiran Kumar #Akshay #Karthik R Participating Organisations # Forum for Science and Development # Free Software Users group Bangalore Kannada localisation The necessity to localise the computer in our mother tongue Get in touch with me if you are interested in Swatantra Kannada localisation Vikram Vincent Reference * Announcement